大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People's War site by Catherine Garvie, Learning Project Manager at 大象传媒 Scotland on behalf of the Greenock War Detectives project and has been added with their permission. The authors fully understand the site's terms and conditions.

I started working with Kincaids when I was 14 years old, in 1944. I turned 14 at the end of December and started work at the end of January. My first wage was 6 and thrupence and that was for working a 47-hour week.

Although I was employed by Kincaids I worked in every shipyard from the top of Port Glasgow right down the river. My trade was a copper smith so I worked in the outfitting department. When you were that age you had to look for a trade to go into, so I chose that. You more or less got your choice of trade but it鈥檚 not like that nowadays.

I worked with Kincaids for 47 and a half years so I must have seen hundreds of different ships being built over the years, probably 7 or 8 a year. The ships took around 6 months to build and we usually worked on them during the last eight weeks before they were launched, just finishing the ship really.

Looking back, the conditions in the yards were pretty rough. It was dirty and very noisy because of all the riveting going on. There were lot of workers in the yards at that time so it was always really crowded. The yards could be quite a dangerous place to work and there were lots of accidents. There were a lot of bad practices in the early days I remember at one time there were so many accidents we were running out of first aid things.

I loved working in the yards and didn鈥檛 miss a single days work in the 47 and a half years I worked there.

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